By Bill Turianski on 23 April 2015; twitter.com/billsportsmaps.com.Demographics of South Korea…
The population of South Korea is around 51.3 million {2014 estimate}. This puts South Korea as the 26th-most-populous nation on Earth. South Korea is very small, though: it is the 109th-largest country (at 100,210 km-sq or 66,690 mi-sq). That makes South Korea slightly smaller than Iceland, and slightly larger than Hungary. Largest city (by far) is, of course, Seoul…which is absolutely gigantic, and has a metro-area population that is fifth-largest on the planet. Seoul has a special-city population of around 10.1 million, and metro-area population of around 25.5 million ! {2014 figures). Only Tokyo, Japan (at ~36.9 million), Shanghai, Jakarta, and Delhi have larger metro-area populations than does Seoul. (I guess you learn something new everyday.) Basically, half of the population of South Korea resides in Seoul’s metropolitan area. South Korea has about the 30th-highest adjusted-GDP in the world {see this, List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita).

KBO League established 1982; title is called Korean Series championship; there are 10 teams in the KBO League/ season is 126 g/Apr-Oct…
(KBO, or Korea Baseball Organization, is the governing body of the sport in the country).

Pro major-league baseball in South Korea began in 1982, with the institution of the KBO League as a 6-team league; a minor league was established eight years later in 1990 – the KBO Futures League. In 1986, the KBO League expanded to include a seventh team. In the first decade of its existence, the KBO League as a whole was only drawing in the 5 to 7 K range. By 1991, the KBO League had 8 teams. In 1995, cumulative attendance for the season finally topped 10 K per game, boosted by the exciting 1995 KBO season which saw three teams, the OB Bears, the LG Twins, and the Lotte Giants, go neck-to-neck for the pennant (the title in ’95 was won by the OB, now Doosan, Bears). However, this league attendance figure wasn’t surpassed for 14 years. After 1995, the KBO began to see dwindling fan interest that lasted for a decade. What first helped reverse the gradual slide in attendances from 1996 to 2004 was the good showing that the South Korean national baseball team had in the first World Baseball Classic, in 2005, when they finished in third. Another boost to the game there came three years later, when South Korea narrowly lost to Japan in extra innings in the second World Baseball Classic, and then six months later, the South Korean baseball team won the gold medal in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. These results convinced many South Korean sports fans that KBO baseball was a product worth supporting. In 2008, league-wide attendance shot up 2.3 K per game to 10.4 K; the next year [2009] it was 11.1 K, and the KBO League has drawn above 11 K ever since.

And there is no doubt that the caliber of Korean baseball players has improved in the last 25 years. There is a large number of South Koreans playing in Japan, in the Nippon Professional Baseball League. In the United States, in Major League Baseball, there are currently 5 Korean players, including LA Dodgers starting LHP pitcher Hyun-jin Ryu, and Cincinnati Reds slugger and OF Shin-Soo Choo {see this, List of Major League Baseball players from South Korea}.

KBO League in the last two-and-a-half decades (1990s through 2010s)/ including present-day make-up of the KBO League [2015]…
There were a few franchise shifts in the ensuing two decades (1990s to 2010). It wasn’t until 2013 that the KBO League finally got a ninth team (the NC Dinos). Now, for 2015, the KBO League continues to exhibit robust signs of health by finally getting to the nice round figure of 10 teams, with the addition of the KT Wiz. The KT Wiz look to have a serious uphill climb though, seeing as how they started their KBO existence going 3-and-17 (!) and sit last (as of 24 April 2015/ 2015 table here).

The KBO League is, in 2015, comprised of the following…5 teams from Greater Seoul/Incheon/Suwon (metropolitan-area Greater Seoul)…
3 teams from Seoul’s core-city-region: (Doosan Bears, LG Twins, Nexen Heroes); and
2 teams from Greater Seoul, with one team in South Korea’s third-largest city of Incheon (SK Wyverns), and
one team about 19 miles south of Seoul-city-center in Suwon (the brand-new KBO team the KT Wiz; KT Wiz).5 KBO teams from the rest of South Korea…
The other 5 teams in the KBO League are comprised as follows [clockwise on the map]…
one team from the fifth-largest city, Daejon (Hanwah Eagles);
one team from the the fourth-largest city, Daegu (Samsung Lions);
one team from the second-largest city Busan, (Lotte Giants);
one team from the 8th-largest city, Changwon (recent-expansion-team NC Dinos; NC Dinos); and
one team from the sixth-largest city, Gwanju (KIA Tigers, who are the most successful team in KBO, with 10 titles, last in 2009).
…

Attendances of KBO clubs in general

KBO League attendance in 2014 was 11,302 per game.

(Note: if you want to see year-by-year/team-by-team KBO League attendance figures, the link to the KBO site’s page on attendance can be found if you scroll down to the foot of this post, where you will see an instruction guide to translate the headers to English).

League-wide cumulative attendance in the KBO’s first division these days varies from around 11 K to 13 K per game, depending on how certain teams fare in any given season. With only 9 [now 10] teams in the KBO League, a few teams’ crowd-size variations can really skew the league numbers.

Lotte Giants weird crowd-size fluctuations and the possible harm of expansion in the KBO…
The club with the biggest crowd variation from year-to-year is Lotte Giants of second-city Busan (which is on the south coast of the country). Generally speaking, Lotte can draw 20 K if the team is doing well (as in 2012), but they usually only draw about 12 K if the team is doing poorly (like in 2007 and 2014). But it is starting to appear that recent (2013) expansion in the KBO will end up hurting Lotte Giants’ ability to draw large crowds. It looks like nearby new team the NC Dinos (who are from Changwon, which is located about 25 miles west of Lotte Giants) might be starting to erode Lotte Giants’ crowd sizes. I say this because we have seen it happen elsewhere in top-division baseball in the recent past – namely, in the 2005 to 2011 time period, when the MLB’s Montreal franchise moved to Washington, DC and started to erode the nearby (~35 miles up the road) MLB team the Baltimore Orioles’ crowd sizes. The Orioles drew 34 K in 2004, but once Washington got an MLB team again, 6 years later the Orioles were only drawing in the mid-to-low-20s K (like drawing only 23.5 K in 2009, then only drawing an alarming 21 K in 2010). So the Nats were knocking off at least 5-to-7 K worth of attendance from the O’s circa the 2006-11 time frame, and it looked to be a problem until both those teams got competitive [circa 2013-on], and crowds for both the Nats and the O’s began to be in the healthy low-30-K range [circa 2014-and-on]). And the same could happen in the south-east coast of South Korea, because Lotte only drew 12.0 K in 2013, when they had a decent .532 winning percentage. Lotte were playing well in 2013, and going by the Lotte’s fanbases’ past behavior (ie, not going to the ballpark when Lotte were having a losing season), the ball club definitely should have been drawing at least in the 17-K-range, if not higher (for example, in 2010, Lotte had a .531 winning pct., and drew 17.8 K). The new factor of nearby fan-dollar competition has now emerged (2013 was NC Dinos’ debut season). NC Dinos, who draw 7-to-8 K, got competitive fast (with a .551 winning pct in their 2nd year in 2014). So it will be interesting to see how this new dynamic in the KBO plays out, and if the Lotte Giants will be able to overcome this imposition on their catchment area.

Other teams such as SK Wyverns of Incheon (crowd-size-variation from 12 K to 16 K), and Nexen Heroes of Seoul (crowd-size-variation from 6 K to 9 K) also have significantly variable crowd sizes in any given year.

The perennial highest drawing clubs in the KBO League are Seoul’s big two: the LG Twins and the Doosan Bears…
The highest draws in KBO League are Seoul’s LG Twins and Doosan Bears. LG and Doosan share the second-largest ball park in the country, Jamsil Baseball Stadium (capacity 30,200) (Lotte Giants’ Busan Sajik Baseball Stadium is slightly larger at 30,500-capacity). Both LG Twins and OB Bears were charter members of KBO in 1982 (OB Bears were founded in Daejeon in 1982; the franchise moved to Seoul in 1985 [with same name kept], before being officially renamed the Doosan Bears in 1999). The OB Bears played their first season in Seoul in 1985 at a since-demolished stadium, then in 1986 moved over to the Jamsil stadium and have shared the venue with the Twins ever since [the Nexen Heroes also use the Jamsil stadium for big games/ see Nexen section a few lines below]. Both LG Twins and Doosan Bears’ attendance has improved considerably in the last decade, and both have drawn between 15 and 20 K in the last five seasons (2010-14). However, neither ball club is particularly successful, though, because the last of the LG Twins’ 2 titles was won in 1994, while the last of the OB/Doosan Bears’ 3 titles was won in 2001. So the big 2 of Seoul have become complacent.3rd-best draw in KBO are SK Wyverns…
Besides the aforementioned take-em-or-leave-em nature of Lotte’s fickle fanbase, the only other team in South Korea that can draw in the thirteen-to-fifteen-K-range is the SK Wyverns, a relatively new club (est. 2000), from the far-western-part of Greater Seoul in the city of Incheon. SK, whose nickname of ‘wyvern’ refers to a type of dragon, basically drew terrible in their early days (ie, 2.6 K in their second season in 2001), but once they started racking up the first of their 3 titles (2007, 2008, 2010), the ball club stated drawing better, and now can easily draw in the 12 to 15 K range, and SK Wyverns drew 12.9 K last year [2014].Worst-drawing KBO club is Nexen Heroes (from the western-side of Seoul)…
The lowest-drawing club in the KBO League is Seoul’s ugly-stepchild-club, the title-less Nexen Heroes (est. 2008), who draw between 5 and 8 K. The Nexen Heroes did come close to glory last season, though, when they drew 6.9 K and made it to their first Korean Series, but fell to the Samsung Lions in 6 games {see this, 2014 Korean Series}.
…

Hats off to reigning KBO camps the Samsung Lions…

Samsung Lions are the second-most successful baseball club in South Korea, with 8 titles – four of which they have won consecutively (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014). The dark-sky-blue-and-silver Samsung Lions draw between 6 and 9 K at their snug, 10 K-capacity Daegu Baseball Stadium, in Daegu. Daegu, which is located inland in the south-east of the Korean peninsula, is the fourth-largest city in South Korea, and has a metro-area population of around 2.4 million.

Samsung Lions drew 7.8 K last year, which made them the team that filled their ballpark the best in the KBO in 2014 (ie, the highest percent-capacity, at 78.9). The Samsung Lions have won all their four straight Korean Series championships under manager Ryu Joong-il. In 2014, the Lions boasted three sluggers who hit 30 HR or more (Hyoung-woo Choi, Yamaico Navarro, and Lee Seung-yeop); those 3 players are featured below…
Photo and Image credits above –
Logo/cap/batting helmet, illustration by 삼성 라이온즈 samsunglions.com/en/intro/intro_2_2.asp.
Ryu Joong-il, photo by Yonhop at english.yonhapnews.co.kr/culturesports.
Hyoung-woo Choi, photo by Yonhop via koreatimes.co.kr/news/sports.
Yamaico Navarro, photo unattributed at licey.com.
Lee Seung-yeop, photo unattributed at koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article.
Action photo from April 2015 at Daegu Baseball Stadium with crowd behind home plate, photo by Solmin at idaegu.com/?c=6&uid=313363.
Samsung Lions cheerleaders and crowd at Daegu Baseball Stadium, photo by LHD at yeongnam.com/news.
Mascot-logo illustration by samsunglions.com.
___
Thanks to all at the following links…
-Globe-map of South Korea, by Ksiom at File:South Korea (orthographic projection).svg (commons.wikimedia.org).
-Blank map of South Korea, by NordNordWest at :FileSouth Korea location map.svg (commons.wikimedia.org).
-Attendance…koreabaseball.com/Record/Crowd/History (koreabaseball.com).
and…
-A very Big Thanks to Dan at MyKBO.net, for tweeting me the 2015 KBO League attendances AND translating the headers there :) Mykbo.net ; @Mykbo.net
…
How to read KBO League attendance figures (at the official KBO site) if you can’t read Korean…
1.) go here.
2). use the following list to translate the [non-acronym] headers…”From left – right: Samsung, KIA, Lotte, LG, Doosan, Hanhwa, SK, Nexen, NC, KT, Hyundai, Ssangbangwool’.
3). PS, Hyundai and Ssangbangwool are defunct KBO teams.

The KBO began it’s season last week. 2009 Korea Series champions were the Kia Tigers, of Gwanju.
Last season, as a league, the Korea Baseball Organization averaged 11,138 per game.
The biggest draw in South Korea are the Lotte Giants (of Busan), who averaged 20,597 per game last season. The next highest drawing teams are two of the three ball clubs from the capital, Seoul…the Doosan Bears, who averaged 15,731 per game in 2009, and the LG Twins, who drew 14,778 per game. Fourth highest were the SK Wyverns of Inchon, who pulled in 12,556 per game last year. Fifth highest were the champs, Kia Tigers, who drew 8,818 per game. That was a 51% increase over the 2008 figure, which was 5,838 per game. That puts the Kia Tigers as having the same small-sized fan base as the other 3 KBO teams, who all drew below 6,000 per game in 2009.
[Note: if you want to see KBO attendance figures, I would recommend going to my February 2010 post (via the link at the top of this post), and scroll down 2/3rds of the page, to 2 paragraphs above the Kia Tigers photos. Because at the KBO site, on the attendances list, half the teams' names are printed in Korean...I translated them and listed them in the order that they appear on the KBO site.]

Thanks to the Demis site, for the base map of the Korean Peninsula… Demis.nl.
Thanks to Locker Room.co.kr, for the cap photos… KBO merchandise.

The Korean Baseball Organization was established in 1982, and began with 6 teams. There are now 8 teams in the league. The KBO has seen a surge in popularity in the last couple of seasons, and in 2009 the league had it’s highest-ever attendance numbers. The 2009 Korean Series was won by South Korea’s most successful baseball club, the Kia Tigers. The Kia Tigers have won 10 of the 29 Korean Series titles that the KBO has played. The Tigers are from Gwangju, which is in the south-west of the Korean peninsula, and is the 6th largest city in South Korea, with a population {2006} of 1.4 million. The Tigers, like all teams in the KBO, are not named after their home-city but after their parent corporation, in this case, the automobile manufacturer Kia Motors. Kia Motors bought the Tigers ball club from the Hatai Corporation in 2001.
Last year, the Kia Tigers were powered by both of their allowed two foreign players. One was pitcher Rick Guttormson (USA-born, and a former NPB player who threw a no-hitter for the Yakult Swallows in 2006), who went 13-4, with a 3.24 ERA. The other was 2009 wins and innings-pitched leader Aquilano Lopez (Dominican Republic-born, and a former Detroit Tigers player), who went 14-5, with a 3.12 ERA. Offensively, the Tigers relied on former Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Hee-seop Choi, who hit .302 with 32 home runs.

For the 2009 regular season, the Korea Baseball organization had a cumulative average attendance of 11,138 per game.

As you can see, South Korea’s second-largest city, Busan (population, 3.5 million {2008}) has the ball club with the biggest fan base, the Lotte Giants. The Lotte Giants averaged 20,597 per game at their 28,500-capacity Sajik Stadium. The Lotte Group also owns the Nippon Professional Baseball team the Chiba Lotte Marines. The next two highest-drawing teams in the KBO are both from Seoul, the capital and largest city in South Korea (population 10.4 million{2007}). The Doosan Bears drew 15,731 per game and the LG Twins drew 14,778 per game last season. Both ball clubs play in the 30,000-capacity Jamsil Baseball Stadium. Fourth-highest drawing ball club in Korea are the SK Wyverns of Inchon which is South Korea’s third largest city (population 2.6 million {2005}). The SK Wyverns averaged 12,556 per game in 2009. [A Wyvern is a mythical winged dragon.] After these 4 ball clubs, there is a significant drop-off in fan base size, with the fifth-best gate figures being the Kia Tigers’ 8,314 per game. The other three KBO teams do not average higher than 6,000 per game.

[Note: I am not covering KBO attendance on a team-by-team basis on the map here, but I will post a KBO attendance map in mid March, a few days before the 2010 KBO season starts on March 27th.]

The KBO initially went through a period of slight growth and then sudden rising popularity with a spike in attendance in 1995, boosted by the exciting 1995 season which saw three teams, the OB Bears, the LG Twins, and the Lotte Giants, go neck-to-neck for the pennant (the title in ’95 was won by the OB, now Doosan, Bears). The KBO had its then-peak attendance in 1995, of 10,727 peer game. This figure wasn’t surpassed for 14 years. After 1995, the KBO began to see dwindling fan interest that lasted for a decade. What first helped reverse the gradual slide in attendances from 1996 to 2004 was the good showing the South Korean national baseball team had in the first World Baseball Classic, in 2005, when they finished in third. Another boost to the game here came three years later, when South Korea narrowly lost to Japan in extra innings in the second World Baseball Classic, and then six months later, the South Korean baseball team won the gold medal in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. These results convinced many South Korean sports fans that KBO baseball was a product worth supporting. And there is no doubt that the calibre of Korean baseball players has improved in the last 25 years. There is a large number of South Koreans playing in Japan, in the Nippon Baseball League. In the United States, in Major League Baseball, there are currently two Korean players: free agent pitcher Chan Ho Park (who in 1994 became the first Korean player in Major League Baseball) and Cleveland Indians’ right fielder Shin-Soo Choo, who hit 20 home runs and batted .300 in 2009 for the Tribe. These days, KBO ball games, and South Korean high school baseball games, are attended by a considerable amount of MLB scouts.

Here is a good site for KBO news, called True Stories of Korean Baseball {click here} .

KBO attendance figures, KBO attendance figures from KBO official site [list of teams at the top is only partially in English, so here are the teams as they are listed in order of left to right at the top of the attendances list...SK Wyverns, Kia Tigers, Samsung Lions, Hanwha Eagles, LG Twins, Doosan Beras, Lotte Giants, Nexen Heroes].

Thanks to Aaron Shinsano (who is a part-time scout for the Chicago Cubs in Korea), at East Windup Chronicle, a KBO and Asian baseball blog, {click here} .
Thanks to Jeremy at Albion Road [on the blogroll here at 'Football Club Guide'], for showing me how to add links in code. Albion Road, here .

Thanks to commenter John, who put in a request for a KBO map and a CPBL (Taiwan) map last November.